Core C: External Innovative Network The overarching goal of the External Innovative Network Core is to promote scientific advances in the area of health and economic status in older populations. Since substantial advances can occur through international research collaboration, this Core will maintain and expand collaborative research with international scholars and facilitate exchanges between U.S. scholars and international researchers. The Core will promote collaboration among the research leaders of ongoing surveys on the economics, demography, and health of older people, such as the Health and Retirement Study in the United States, ELSA in England, SHARE in continental Europe, and CHARLS in China. The involvement of countries with different institutional policies for promoting the well-being of the elderly enables analyses that can discriminate among these policies regarding their advantages and disadvantages. Single-country studies seldom encounter sufficient institutional variation to permit such conclusions. The Core's collaborative research efforts will include a visiting-scholars program providing for sabbatical stays as well as shorter-term stays at the RAND Corporation, where the Core is based, together with a complementary program of short stays by RAND researchers at foreign institutions. The Core will sponsor one conference or workshop per year. Topics may include long-term care and comparative research across the international surveys. The Core will encourage greater international representation among participants in the RAND Summer Institute, which seeks to effect cross-fertilization among different social-science disciplines and between the social sciences and the biomedical disciplines. All these mechanisms for bringing scholars into person-to-person contact can be especially valuable for projects and researchers who are just beginning to interact and lay the foundations for future productive networks, which can subsequently be sustained through email or other Internet-based communications. Katherine Carman will serve as the Core Director for the External Innovative Network. Prior to joining RAND, she was an assistant professor in the Economics Department of Tilburg University (The Netherlands), and a former RWJ Scholar in Health Policy Research at Harvard. Her international experience and research network will help to support this project.